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Concentrated poverty is arguably the biggest problem U.S. cities face today—and it’s only getting bigger. The number of American poor living in depressed neighborhoods—those with at least 40 percent of residents below poverty line—has been on the rise since the 1990s . And according to a new analysis of Census data by the Brookings Institution, the recession further accelerated this upward trend. [For more of this story, written by Tanvi Misra, go to ...

Colleges should be doing more to recruit low-income students and to support them as they work to finish their degrees, says a new report released by the Department of Education. The report also shines a light on the successes some colleges have had in promoting greater access to low-income students and increasing graduation rates. "Many colleges and universities have taken important steps to make college a reality for low income students, but unfortunately today those success stories are the...

RICHMOND, Calif. — The odds were good that Lonnie Holmes, 21, would be the next person to kill or be killed in this working-class suburb north of San Francisco. Four of his cousins had died in shootings. He was a passenger in a car involved in a drive-by shooting, police said. And he was arrested for carrying a loaded gun. But when Holmes was released from prison last year, officials in this city offered something unusual to try to keep him alive: money. They began paying Holmes as much as...

Tucked in remarks the president made Tuesday on the opioid epidemic was his announcement of a new task force on mental health parity — aimed at ensuring that people with mental illnesses and substance abuse problems don’t face discrimination in the health care system. Despite a landmark 2008 law intended to do just that, enforcement has been paltry, and advocates say discrimination has continued. “The goal of the task force is to essentially develop a set of tools, guidelines, mechanisms so...

Sometimes a photo can express more than words ever can. That’s especially true when it comes to mental health conditions, which are challenging to explain to those who don’t understand what it’s like to experience them. Despite the fact that these disorders bring about crippling physical and emotional symptoms, the illnesses often are “invisible” to the naked eye — and that can perpetuate negative stereotypes that someone’s suffering is “all in their head.” Enter these stunning photos,...

Solitary confinement is a practice that has been used in the U.S. prison system since 1829. It is based on a Quaker belief that prisoners isolated in stone cells with only a Bible use the time to repent, pray and find introspection. In other words, it would give the individual the opportunity to learn a lesson from the experience. By 1890, reports showed that many of the inmates went insane, committed suicide or were no longer able to function in society. When I was incarcerated in the Iowa...

Years before anyone had heard of ACEs, Brenda Jones Harden was a social worker in the child welfare system. She worked with children who had spent their lives in foster care, children whose parents died young from drugs or disease or street violence. “I thought: Here are the children who are the most vulnerable. Not only are they poor, not only do they have educational problems, but they have been traumatized. It made me want to devote the rest of my career to these children.” Brenda began...

One of the first pieces of advice I received as a new mother was to never let my baby use me as a pacifier. I took this advice to heart, resolving to keep my daughter on an ironclad feeding schedule: once every two hours, 20 minutes on each side, so regular that I may as well have asked her to punch in and out at each shift. Even with these strict self-imposed limits, breastfeeding was more of a commitment than I had anticipated. For the next few weeks I barely left the house so that I could...

Leah Esguerra, a social worker in San Francisco, begins her workday roaming in between the bookshelves at the city's Main Library. She's looking for homeless people who need her assistance. Esguerra is the nation's first library social worker. Since 2009, she's been providing social services and outreach programs to many of the city’s homeless patrons. On this particular rainy morning, she’s hoping to find her client, John, who suffers from depression and is in need of mental health care and...

When I was applying to college, I wanted to go to one of the best schools. At the time, I thought of “the best,” as the colleges that were the most selective. I applied to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—schools whose reputations are burnished as much by the huge numbers of applicants who are denied admission, as the privileged few who are let in. But over the years I’ve learned that there are many other ways to measure what makes a school great. Institutions like Harvard (where I ended up...

On April 1, at least half a million Americans will wake up no longer eligible for the food assistance benefits that have, for decades, been a crucial lifeline for the poor in a harsh economic landscape. A clause in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act limited Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to three months in any given 36-month period for unemployed adults between the ages of 18 and 49 who are not working or enrolled in a job-training or...

A dozen old, white, property-owning men sit around a pub and decide how best to govern America. Is this the scene of a town hall during the American Revolution or a local city council meeting today? It could be either. And that's a problem. The reality is that most public meetings still skew older, whiter, and wealthier. When city planning meetings or budget committee hearings attract such a narrow minority of the population, policy decisions that tend to favor the few at the expense of the...